| George Michael – Father Figure Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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This beautiful song is primarily about the devoted singer who is truly and deeply in love -- in love with someone who is in a very vulnerable place and desperately needs someone to provide comfort, stability, and unconditional love (i.e. a father figure). Perhaps the recipient of this love is young, so the singer is willing to risk a love that can be "mistaken for a crime" in order to give the young person what he/she needs. At a deeper level, there is also a confessional aspect to the what the singer is saying: this song is also his promise to always focus only on the true needs of his beloved, and not his own needs that he may be projecting onto his lover. This is what he means by having had enough of "crime", where he has let his own needs come first, as opposed to providing "whatever you ask for" and providing a love that lasts "until the end of time." But the main message of the song, loud and clear, is in praise of an unselfish love that entirely devoted to the well-being of the recipient of this love. |
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| The Cure – From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I have a different interpretation: I think this, like many of The Cure's songs, is actually a stinging critique of the futility and emptiness of dating relationships for young people in the Western world. In this song he describes the reality of someone who has been through many relationships, and is now so deeply filled with doubt, that even as he feels love, he anticipates the failure of the relationship, and the empty feeling that he will have at the end of it (and thereby also sabotages that same relationship). "her" is actually a generic woman -- he has fallen for so many women, and he keeps falling in love, but it is always ephemeral, always leading to heartbreak. He wants what we all want -- true love, constant companionship, something to fill the hole in his heart. And yet after each failed relationship, he feels farther from his "home" -- where home here refers to the magical place where we feel comfortable, at ease, secure, whole. The Cure never go far enough to suggest a better system than the horrific modern-day system of "serial dating" -- which leaves lasting emotional scars, self-doubt, and "complexes," -- and leads to insecure failing marriages. But still they point it out very clearly in their songs, and I think very clearly in this one. |
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